


An Ember in the Rafters

by arianne-of-porne (allnuthatchforest)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ADWD spoilers, Angst, Cunnilingus, F/M, Femdom, Finger Sucking, Fingerfucking, Flirting, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:56:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allnuthatchforest/pseuds/arianne-of-porne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While at the Wall, Asha finds herself desiring the company of the Lord Commander's beautiful young steward. And when it comes to pretty boys, Asha usually gets what she wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Ember in the Rafters

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Wicked Blood" by Sea Wolf.

Asha pulls the furs tight around her shoulder and watches the candle flame gutter. She’s bored, but the activity is also strangely calming; it doesn’t involve drinking watery ale with men who seem but pale shadows of her own lost crew, or staring at the shattered eyes and gashlike smile of her brother, which make her want to weep as if she was their mother, haunting a seaside tower and railing against the plague of storms that has beaten everything she loved to death.

Then a rapping at the door startles her out of her brooding. “Come,” she says brusquely.

The door swings open and it’s Lord Snow’s steward, a beautiful, slim boy with wild, glossy black curls, eyes as richly brown as the spiced cacao drink popular around the Summer Sea, and a proud, sweet, saucy air that had made Asha immediately take notice and recall for the first time in what felt like months that it’s been quite some time since she’s been with a man. 

“Wine, my lady,” the steward says. 

Asha turns slowly, sitting sideways in her chair, and regards him with her head half-turned. Satin, Jon Snow had called him. She hopes he wasn’t born with that name, although she can’t picture him as a Walder or a Dickon. He stands there motionless, holding a tray with a bottle of wine and a glass on it. Only one glass, Asha notes. So Lord Snow didn’t send the boy there to entertain her, then. 

“Thank you.” She stands, drawing up to her full height, careful not to let her fatigue show. “So your Lord intends his lady guests to drink alone, is that so? Afraid his men will end up less a few fingers? Or is it bastards on the Wall he’s worried about? Don’t worry, I won’t get any of you crows with child.”

Satin smiles. Sweetly; the boy seems incapable of doing anything any other way, although Asha would wager he’s anything but innocent. “You sound disappointed about that,” he says in a mellifluous voice.

“Aye,” she replies, grinning despite herself. “You might birth me a pretty winged kraken. Your vows say you’ll father no children, but it says nothing about mothering them.” 

Satin takes a few steps into the room, and the flame gilds his hair and makes his soft skin glow. Asha wasn’t sure before, but now she’s determined to have him, for warmth, for pleasure, for an intoxication and forgetting no amount of watered-down Wall wine can give her. “They say King Stannis’s red woman can make all sorts of strange things possible. Perhaps we should seek her out.” 

“I think for my purposes we need none but the two of us.” Asha reaches out as if to grasp the goblet by its stem, but she pretends to stumble and nudges the glass with her fingertips so that tips and splashes all over the boy’s tunic. “Oh, bollocks, look what’s happened.” She looks up into his eyes. “Now you’re all cold and wet. I might have a spare tunic. Unless a blanket will do.” 

Asha has never feared rejection, not since she had torn the clothes off that Lyseni sailor, shoved him onto a bunk and fucked herself on his hard cock until she felt like the fucking had made both a man and a woman out of her. But this is a man of the Night’s Watch, she thinks; they have vows, and strange mainland ways of interpreting their words, and somehow those vows become cages stronger than the metal from which they’re made.

Satin doesn’t speak for a moment, and Asha is ready to turn around and pretend she is alone until he leaves. But then he smiles, sliding his soiled tunic over his head. “My lady, a blanket will do just fine.” 

Asha whips the tray away from him and sets it clattering on the table. She takes the wine bottle and drinks deeply; it tastes like piss, and specifically old piss mixed with shit, betrayal, hypocrisy, and cat vomit, but it warms her bones and takes her that much closer to forgetting Theon’s smile, like a crack in the earth, a black empty thing made by force. She grimaces, wipes her mouth and puts the lip of the bottle to Satin’s mouth. He wraps his lips around the mouth slowly as if kissing, and as he drinks she reaches for the laces of his breeches and undoes them briskly. Before she knows it he’s out of his boots and of every layer of his smallclothes; she supposes he’s had more practice removing clothes than even she has. 

And then he’s naked before her, smooth and hairless except for his short beard; he has the long, subtle muscles of a dancer or a nimble young sailor, and for a moment she considers asking him, _come, run away with me, I’ll teach you to tie knots and throw knives, how to use a stone to find the sun when it hides._ But Asha doesn’t know this boy, doesn’t know if he’s bold enough or loyal enough. And she doesn’t know when next she’ll see the ocean. _If I am here to fight_ …she thinks, and shoves that thought from her mind. 

“Have you words, or did you speak before with the tongue of your boot?” she asks. It’s another lamentable quality of these Southron commoners; they’re too polite, they worship blood they way they worship those seven Gods of theirs. Much too polite to make decent lovers for Ironborn women. Satin reaches for the string of her tunic, but the gesture is still too demure, so she grasps his wrists and pushes him back toward the door. 

He tries to wriggle loose, but he only manages to knock his forehead against hers, and with one of his wrists still pinned against the door she hooks two fingers into his mouth and pushes her thigh between his legs until it nudges his cock. His eyes are fixed on hers, sparkling like the night sea.

“I suppose in the South you fuck like flowers,” she laughs. “Drifting back and forth next to each other until the wind spreads your seed.” 

“And in the Iron Islands you always begin by hooking your lovers like fish, my lady?” he says around her finger.

“Only the small ones,” she says. 

“Why would you bother with a small one?” His tongue swirls over the pad of her finger, and then the tip flicks back and forth in a way that must be meant to remind her of what a skilled tongue can do to a cunt. She feels a warm tingle between her thighs. 

“Because it’s worth it when they taste good,” she says, her mouth close to his ear. “Turn around.”

He turns to face the door, and she runs a hand down the curve of his back. His buttocks are firm and rounded, perfect handfuls, and she gives each one a slap before sliding one finger between them. She pauses when her fingertip, the one he sucked and made wet, touches the pucker of his hole and she hears him gasp. 

“You like being buggered, my gilded crow, do you?” she asks, lips against his ear. 

“When what I receive for it is worthwhile, Lady Asha,” he says breathily. 

“So you speak of money? Beware, boy,” she says, beginning to breach his tightness, “the Ironmen do not carry coin. Perhaps you have heard of the iron price?”

“I would not ask you for coin, my lady.” His head falls back as she starts to fuck her finger into him, just a little movement at first, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. 

“Then what is it you want from me?” She stills her finger inside him. “I’ll go no further until I know.”

“I like how you move,” he says. “I watched you before, when you sparred with Ser Adelme. It made me wonder how you fucked.” 

“And are you pleased?” 

“I am pleased, my lady,” he says, “although I liked it better when you moved your finger.” 

She chuckles and bites at his neck. “There’s the boldness I liked. And call me Asha.” She punctuates that with a long stroke that makes him shudder. “Surely you’re well accustomed to pleasure, like the hand becomes calloused by the axe?” 

“I’ve never had an Ironborn lady before.” He starts rolling his hips backwards, fucking himself on her finger. “Or been had by one. But—Asha—are we truly equals now?”

“As only winter, death, and piss-flavored wine can make us.”

“Then will you let me take what I want from you?” 

She smiles wryly and hooks her finger inside him. “What do you want?” 

He cants his hips until he’s free of her finger and turns around. He’s a delicious sight, curls disheveled, lips wet, eyes glazed over. “You against the wall. Or on the bed. And the rest left to me.” 

Bed, she says, just one word, and he follows silently. These activities have sent some blood through her tired bones, but the thought of lying down in a pile of furs and closing her eyes is suddenly irresistible. 

She lets her limbs relax as Satin undoes her boots with the skill of a craftsman, relaxes further still as he slides off her breeches and pushes up her tunic. Then she feels the scratchy hair of his beard against her belly and knows what he wants to do. She had privately bemoaned that beard earlier, thinking that it hid his beauty, but now she’s grateful for it; she can close her eyes and still know that the man moving over her isn’t Qarl, Qarl with his cheeks that would be smooth as a porpoise’s flank even if he became a wizened old man of ninety. Last she saw Qarl was the night they had last made love, before the battle, before the Northmen took him and the rest of her crew into the dungeons of Deepwood Motte. 

Some of the women on Pyke had spoken to her of the things a woman just knows, how she always knows if her man is alive or dead even when he is thousands of miles away. _When a man dies, a raven flies to a woman’s heart,_ Lady Sunderly had said to Asha’s mother once. But no raven had ever come to her. Beside the fires of the Red God, which showed the truth in a thousand splintered, mixed-up shards, there was no way to know. 

Satin buries his nose in the hair on her mound. His fingertips tease at the folds of her cunt, thumb spreading the inner wetness across her lips.

“You like women?” she says. “I couldn’t tell.”

“I like giving and getting pleasure,” he says, his tongue now tasting along the path of his fingers. “And I like strength.” 

She thinks of questions to follow that, but they all fall away as he licks into her. When he seals his mouth over her cunt’s lips and tongues at them as if he’s kissing her mouth, she grabs at his hair and guides him to the point where her pleasure builds most intensely. He licks around that spot, pausing from time to time to suck, and the fur tickles her bare skin as she writhes against it, giving in completely. Then, after his mouth has just managed to make time stop, he pulls his lips away from her cunt and kisses the crease of her thigh.

“What are you doing?” she almost hisses. 

He looks up at her and gives her a crooked, impish smile. Then he laps at her cunt again, thick, strong sideways strokes, and in an instant her cunt pulses and tightens and pleasure is rushing upwards through her, warm, tingling, deep, like an onslaught of unbearable tenderness. Her fingers grip Satin’s hair, and she wants to keep him there indefinitely, as if that would truly forestall dawn, would forestall Justin Massey’s piety, Lord Snow’s pontifications, Theon’s hollowed eyes. 

“I suppose you’ll have to return to your place at Lord Snow’s feet,” she says, finally letting go. “Of course, if you stay, I can give you your salty flood of pleasure as well.” 

“Lord Snow can wait,” Satin whispers. “If he needs a stocking darned at the witching hour, have him ask the red priestess to cast a spell for him.” He moves his way back up her body graceful as a maiden, letting her feel his warmth move along her skin like the ghosts that haunt clothing on a winter’s day. “How do you plan to make a sailor of me tonight?”

It’s tempting to straddle him and ride his pretty cock until he screams, but she can barely sit up right now. So they lie next to each other like young brothers and sisters lie on the rocks to watch the stars, and she wraps her hand around his cock and strokes him. His hair and breath tickle her shoulder, and she sighs deeply, imagining the sea is rocking beneath them.


End file.
